Rewriting: You Have to Know How to Reread
I see this flaw in a lot of beginners: the text is reread (superficially), corrected (not enough), and then sent off too quickly.
Because the rereading is done with the text already known by heart, you miss a lot of details, typos, spelling mistakes and, above all, inconsistencies or things that have been left unfinished. The corrections that have been made have been checked — too quickly. The whole thing hasn’t been reread as if it were a new piece of writing. And this is the case even if you have followed the — good — advice to let it rest. Except that letting a text rest long enough to be surprised by your own writing requires much more than a month away from it. Letting it rest is only preparation, not a rereading method. And besides, you don’t necessarily have the time. So you send it off too quickly, partly just to get it off your hands, to speed up the process, because you want to know whether you’re brilliant or terrible. (Spoiler: most of the time, it’s neither, but somewhere in between.)
And this leaves the reader with a sense of haste, of an unfinished version, while masking any underlying problems and possible improvements that you simply can’t see on your own. Because a screenplay is a bit like an onion: you work on it by discovering it layer by layer, each one revealing new directions, new depths, new possibilities, and new things to refine, correct and clarify, rewrite after rewrite, until you reach its core, and the final full stop.
I’m happy to admit that, for far too long, I too tended to skim the pages when rereading. Or else the words would start to blur on the page, I would start again twenty times, and eventually give up. I know how to reread my work much better now. First of all, because by rereading better, I work better, I go further, and it has become a pleasure rather than a disappointment (who has never fantasised that the first version they dared let someone read was already finished?). It’s a virtuous circle that needs to be applied in the service of the quality of your screenplay, your novel, but also your career. Sending a text off too quickly is, at worst, counterproductive if you are sending it to a producer or publisher, and, at best, not as fruitful as it could have been if you are sending it to a script doctor or readers.
But then how do you read your work as if you hadn’t written it?
First of all, you need to read slowly, really taking your time, and immersing yourself as a reader-screenwriter or reader-writer — since you can never quite cross over to the other side. To reread properly, you need to read the current version as if it were the only version that had ever existed. To do that, you have to read every word, without chewing your way through them. I started by reading aloud, to force myself to do it. And now that I’ve found the right rhythm, I no longer need to do it systematically. You can trigger a change of perspective by changing the medium, for example. And if you don’t want to or can’t print every version, and you don’t necessarily have a tablet as well as a computer, you can also change where you read, which is much simpler. If you wrote at your desk, read and edit at the living-room table. And since writing is 80% rewriting, you will quickly find yourself rewriting elsewhere and facing the same problem. But then you simply change location again, and off you go! Also, if something catches your eye or ear, you need to come back to it, even if you don’t have the solution straight away. Don’t be discouraged by the amount of work involved either. A writer friend used to say, “It’s a lot of work, but it isn’t labour.” Talent is never enough.
Before sending anything off, take it as far as you possibly can on your own, reread it again, and prepare yourself for the fact that there will still be changes to make. And be kind to yourself: one or two typos, a few spelling mistakes, if they remain exceptional, shouldn’t penalise your text, and they are often difficult to avoid*. What really matters is what the screenplay is telling, and how it tells it, and that is above all where you need to know how to reread and rewrite properly.
Knowing how to write also means knowing how to reread your own work.
*NB: if you use AI to correct the grammatical and spelling mistakes in your screenplay, be aware that it will have a great deal of difficulty stopping itself from altering turns of phrase, and sometimes even the substance, even if you have explicitly told it not to. And you will then have even more correction work to do.
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Déborah Braun / 90pages
Script doctor & consultante en scénario
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